(A) "Therefore, I should (gently) attend to it."
(B) "Therefore, I should distribute my attention throughout my body, evenly."
(C) ???
People make choices in meditation based on usually implicit models of meditation/mind/etc.! 1/
Those choices are usually uninterrogated, and they matter.
Ultimately, meditation is implicit, procedural knowledge, like riding a bike. 2/
Best case, people incline towards the right things, over time.
But, a dialogue between implicit and explicit can sometimes expose tacit assumptions, that are quite counterproductive, about what meditation is and how it works. 3/
Tools like the meta protocol put those tacit assumptions front and center, and can be used both implicitly and explicitly!
What if you should pay direct attention to that muscle tension? What if you shouldn't? What if it's something much more nuanced, contextual, shifting, even exquisitely precise?
You can tack closer and closer to that over time, with the right attitudes, questions, methods. 5/
>>>
[...]
(A) "Therefore, I should (gently) attend to it."
(B) "Therefore, I should distribute my attention throughout my body, evenly."
(C) ???
<<<
It doesn't have to be *explicit*, examination, but, don't let unexamined assumptions run the show! 6/6
(1) Once fuel released into circulation, it actually gets into cells via insulin. (2) If no insulin, cells starve. (3) If cells can't respond to insulin, cells starve.
1/
(4) Cells downregulate response to insulin for two reasons:
(4a) when they are stuffed full of fuel or
(4b) when they are overwhelmed by too much insulin. 2/
1/ So, I'd mostly always been relatively thin, faintly athletic. But, I was starving all the time, often w brain fog if it ate the wrong things for too many meals, & I couldn't breathe through my nose for days after eating some foods. &, low mental/physical energy, slow healing.
2/ Eventually, I lost most of my allergies from meditation, and I could eat as much pizza and ice cream as I wanted and still breathe fine at night. And, so I did, for a while. The physical and mental energy plus fast healing were amazing, but I started gaining weight.
3/ And, insulin resistance is weird. There was this background hunger, and I had to keep eating and eating (and gaining weight) to keep up my (amazing) energy and fast healing. I didn't gain *that* much weight, but I freaked out my girlfriend.
2/ To re-summarize, the market is eating everything in a way that's making it alarmingly more difficult for people to have the social relations they want. It's alarming because social relations used to protect people from the market.
3/ I think it's important to note that this difficulty goes beyond, say, the value of money going down and the necessities of life becoming more expensive, so that we all have to work more or spend more time thinking about money versus relationships.